Sovereign class
The Sovereign class of ships are the progenitors of all modern vessels and can be manufactured by any ship yard. For this reason they are found everywhere in the void, controlled by small nations and traders alike.
The Sovereign class was created by Sovereign and given to the rebellious nations to fight the Solar Supremacy. It is the starting point of every other ship class, and its designs are available to all. That's why it is still the most common ship class in the void. Even the smallest Solar nations, and budding settlements being built in the new systems, have access to it. It stands out for its ease of manufacture and its simple, easily adapted structure.
Sovereign-class designs are ubiquitous. Anything Sovereign designed is free as a blueprint and free to manufacture; the plans are easy to get, and nobody criticises anyone for building them. The first ships into the Web were all Sovereign class, used by every nation alike, including Ce-Co and the Kingdom of Saturn, until each built its own over the first decade or so of expansion. Even now they remain common everywhere.
Sovereign left far more than ships: a vast open depository of technology, from water filters and engines to battle suits, tanks and colonial Habs for strange worlds. Other nations take those designs and adapt or upgrade them for their own needs, but the Sovereign class remains the baseline of 31st-century tech: the original pattern behind most of what humanity uses.
Faction classes
Nations take Sovereign blueprints and specialise them. A faction ship will outperform stock Sovereign class in particular roles, not across the board. Each has its own page:
- Titan class: the Kingdom of Saturn
- Hydra class: the Plutocracy
- Ceres class: the Ceres Cooperative
- Raptor class: NOVA
- Hammer class, also called Phobos class: the Martian Confederacy
Manufacturing ships
Any shipyard with Sovereign blueprints (and they are easy to get) can manufacture Sovereign-class ships, or slowly design its own class if it has the resources. Faction designs are another matter. Each nation jealously guards its own class, and only its yards build those ships. A NOVA yard turning out a Phobos-class hull would be top secret and highly irregular. Escort designs are guarded the same way: they are as much part of a fleet as the ships.
A working official faction class takes years: design, testing and successive versions before it can be mass-manufactured and relied on in the void. That is why, for the first decade or so, you only saw Sovereign-class ships out there: it was all the solar nations had. Even now, plenty of fleets are still entirely Sovereign class, flying under a NOVA eagle or a Saturnine coat of arms or a plutarch’s gang glyph.
Those crews are still trained voidsmen of their faction, loyal to their own authority. In practice they serve as an official flotilla of that nation, so they keep the faction's traits even on Sovereign hulls. A Phobos flotilla, for example, stays a bit more willing to hold the fight longer whether it flies Hammer-class ships or stock Sovereign ones.
Ship yards draw ore from the inner asteroid belt, the Kuiper belt, planets and moons of the solar system, and now from asteroids and worlds found through the Web. Ce-Co is the biggest and most militaristic mining power, but not the only one: smaller groups leave room to negotiate. Ce-Co will supply anyone who buys its goods, within reason and if it suits their purposes.
Breaking wrecks down at a yard is rare and not very practical. When salvage happens in earnest it is usually the work of independent traders, pirates and other dregs of society — not the great national shipyards. Loose wrecks and drifting tech in the deep void are more often stripped by scrapfish schools than by human crews.
The Sovereign class freighter is the most common freighter type (see Freighter types).